From Iran’s World Cup protest to 1968 Black Power Salute: When athletes spoke truth to power

On Monday, Iran’s national football team refused to sing the national anthem ahead of their clash with England.

This comes amid the Iran government attempting to crack down on the nationwide protests over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Tehran.

AFP said some Iranian athletes have decided not to sing the national anthem or celebrate the victories of the national team in support of the protesters.

This comes after the team led by Alireza Jahanbakhsh said they hoped to take a ‘collective decision’ on the matter.

Defender Ehsan Hajsaf earlier became the first player of Iran’s national team to open up about the anti-government protests in the country. “They should know that we are with them. And we support them. And we sympathise with them regarding the conditions,” Hajsaf told Reuters. “We have to accept the conditions in our country are not right and our people are not happy. We are here but it does not mean we should not be their voice or we should not respect them.”

This isn’t the first time athletes have spoken truth to power.

Throughout the history of sports, athletes have risked their careers and even their lives to

Let’s take a closer look at a few famous instances:

1968 Black Power salute

Arguably the most famous sports protest in history occurred at the 1968 Olympics when two African-American track and field athletes gave the Black Power salute on the podium.

Those were turbulent times – the United States was engaged in the Vietnam War as well as at odds with protesters at home, the civil rights movement was in full swing, Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated and the Democratic national convention in Chicago had turned into a battlefield.

Meanwhile, Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who won the gold and bronze medals, came prepared to make their point.

As per Smithsonian Magazine, Smith and Carlos had donned black socks and no shoes to symbolise African-American poverty, and a black glove to further express African-American strength and unity.

As the national anthem began and millions watched around the world, Smith and Carlos lowered their heads and raised their fists – in what would be an iconic image.

“It was a polarising moment because it was seen as an example of black power radicalism,” Doug Hartmann, a University of Minnesota sociologist and the author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath told the magazine.  “Mainstream America hated what they did.”

Afterwards, all hell broke loose – the athletes were thrown out of the Olympic Village, suspended from the team and suffered the consequences of their actions for years afterwards.

However, history remembers Smith and Carlos as champions and pioneers who dared risk everything for moral principle.

Ali and his gold medal

In 1960, a young Cassius Clay – still years from becoming Muhammad Ali – travelled to the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

Clay, who took over the games entirely and became the unofficial mayor of the Olympics Village, competed in the light heavyweight division.

The 18-year-old proceeded to win all his fights – with a little trouble in the early rounds of the final bout – and collected a gold medal for his efforts.

Ali in his book The Greatest: My Own Story –­ co-written by Richard Durham – told how proud he was of the medal. The young man ate it, wore it, shone it and even slept with it.

Until the day he went into a diner in his hometown and was refused service because of the colour of his skin.

The young Clay, according to the book, incredulous at being denied service despite being a winner of Olympic gold, promptly walked out of the establishment in disgust. On the way home, Clay tossed his gold medal in the river as a form of protest.

While it makes for a great story, Ali himself has dismissed it, telling biographers his the gold medal simply ‘got lost somewhere’.

Perhaps no story better encompasses the aphorism ‘when the legend becomes fact print the legend’.

‘I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcongs’

When Muhammad Ali was told he had been drafted by the US government for the Vietnam War, the 24-year-old was incredulous.

He was, after all, heavyweight champion of the world in 1966.

Not to mention the fact that he’d failed the pre-enlistment test not once but twice.

“I am a member of the Black Muslims, and we don’t go to no wars unless they’re declared by Allah himself,” the Associated Press quoted Ali as saying at the time. “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Vietcongs.”

By April 1967, Ali’s stance against the Vietnam War had hardened – leading him to refuse to be inducted into the US Army on religious grounds.

The response from the establishment was swift and merciless – Ali was stripped of his title, his boxing license was revoked, he was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000.

Ali’s stance was vindicated with a unanimous verdict by the US Supreme Court in 1971 after spending several years unable to make a living, and facing the threat of prison.

While Ali lost the best years of his boxing prime, he gained immeasurable position as a global icon.

Zimbabwe players don black armbands during World Cup game

Before Zimbabwe was to play its first cricket match in the 2007 World Cup, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga put out a statement to the media saying they would be wearing black armbands to “mourn the death of democracy in Zimbabwe”.

While Flower wore his armband while walking to the middle, Olonga was seen wearing his on the players’ balcony.

The gesture put not only their careers but their very lives at risk – the then Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe had been accused of torturing opponents in terror camps.

“If guys want to take me out they can,” Olonga was quoted as saying by Cricinfo. “They know where I live.”

The media was effusive with Simon Barnes in the Times writing that the move was a “powerful blow for sanity, decency and democracy”, while in the Daily Telegraph, Donald Trelford said the players “shine out like diamonds in a pile of mud”.

The aftermath saw both men abruptly retiring from cricket and leaving the country.

Colin Kaepernick takes a knee

The media first noticed Colin Kaepernick sitting on the bench during a national anthem in August 2016.

In fact, he’d been doing it for a while to protest police brutality and racial injustice.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour,” Kaepernick told the media after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

In September, Kaepernick and his teammate Eric Reid changed their method of protest to taking a knee.

“The message is we have a lot of issues in this country that we need to deal with. We have a lot of people that are oppressed. We have a lot of people that aren’t treated equal, given equal opportunities. Police brutality is a huge thing that needs to be addressed. There are a lot of issues that need to be talked about, to be brought to life, and we need to fix those,” Kaepernick said.

By next year, Donald Trump was in office and kneeling during the national anthem had become a hot button issue.

Kaepernick who opted out of a contract with his team that year, would in October 2017 file a collusion grievance against NFL owners after going unsigned as a free agent.

While the two sides reached a settlement in 2019, Kaepernick has had little interest from teams since his protest.

When the NFL released a statement after the George Floyd in 2020, many criticised the league for its treatment of the quarterback.

With inputs from agencies

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